New Journeyman League Starting Today!

I know I know this is normally webcomic day, but my mind has turned back to Warmachine and Hordes for the moment. The reason why? We’re starting a Journeyman League today! That’s a slow-grow league where you start with a starter box and add a little bit over time to get started. There’s bonuses around both painting and games played, and a new award for sportsmanship. The goal is fun!

We did two of these in the old edition of the rules, but haven’t done one yet in the new edition. I get to play the new Trollbloods starter box so that’ll be a changeup for me. Most of our local players are actually using the opportunity to get going with a new faction, but I’m using this more as an excuse to get more painting done now that I’m off to a good start with that!

The last model I painted was the Runebearer, who has a lot going on with runestones and such, a common motif for the Trolls.

There are two major areas I haven’t done yet. One is adding some sort of color and glow to the runes on all those runestones. I’m trying to figure out what color I want that to be, and then I need to figure out a technique! That’s certainly something that could be good to figure out and then hit a lot models at once with that.

The other is the tartan area. If I’m honest with myself, I’m not a good enough painter to do a tartan plaid. I’ve seen pictures of peoples’ Trollbloods where these areas are a single, eye-catching color (reds look particularly good), and I’ve been thinking about that. There’s one model on the horizon that has me thinking about one color in particular…

That’s the 3-D model of the Sea King, coming out later this year. The pirate lover in me really likes the idea of a giant Troll with a pirate ship on his head and a ship anchor as a weapon. With all that seaweed and stuff running down, a brighter green color for the tartan area could be an interesting unifying color, and would then match with the Sea King one day. I may try that out!

Because I’m liking how the Runebearer turned out, I am thinking that next I would like to paint the Runeshapers, who are the more combat-oriented mages. More runestones!

They’re more armored, but really most of that is just more runestones. I think the simple browns I was using will look good with the earth-magic theme for these guys. I also love playing them, so it’ll be great to have them painted!

If I’m doing them, it seems to me that the next thing to paint is then the leader of the Runeshapers, Janissa Stonetide!

Janissa is one of the excellent combat ladies in Warmachine and Hordes (there’s actually a number of these in Trollbloods, one of the things I like!). I may have stolen the rock effect piece from a Runeshaper… I think she looks great with it, something I had seen others do online. Unfortunately, when drybrushing her with white I had too much water and paint on the brush, and it ended up less drybrush and more just painting. So it’ll be really nice to get her painted just so that the model looks cleaner.

I happened to see an excellent looking Janissa on eBay. I didn’t buy it, and I don’t know who to credit with this… but it has me inspired on painting her. It made me go to the model and look, and lo and behold, there is a faint line along the bottom of her robe that you can easily paint another color. The gold with the red pops really well and I might do something similar, maybe with a bronze.

Anyway, that’s where I want to get started with painting my Trollbloods for this Journeyman League! I hear rumors that the Troll starter box is awful against the other boxes (but they’re great models to own and use otherwise), so I have no aspirations of winning. Just painting and having a good time! I’ll share some pictures as I go along!

Hey that’s me! My guest appearance on the Trollblood Scrum is finally live in podcast form: http://handcannononline.com/blog/2017/10/04/the-scrumcast-ep-18-vs/ What we say is still valid for a couple reasons. One is we were ...

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